In life it's not where you go but who you are with……Charles Shultz
Vagabonds Tales- Slip Over the Border
September 18, 2021
Very aromatic rose in Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art Gardens
We had planned to head out this morning for Rehoboth Beach Boardwalk but realized it was a special week. Not only was the President of the US and his crew coming in but also it was the annual Bear weekend [LBGQ] where they get thousands of participants. We decided to pass on the crowds and slipped across to Maryland instead. There we visited the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art. Seeing 8 other people was just the right number for us today.
Stephen and Lemuel Ward of Crisfield , Maryland ( Located right on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay) carved birds for more than fifty years, both for hunting decoys and decorative bird carvings. if you notice shells on his desk…that is where Lem mixed his paints to use on the fowl.Some of these defy gravity. They are not suspended by string of any kind.They hold a Ward Decoy carving championship every year. I think it is very interesting that to qualify each must pass the float test.
We have several decoys and carvings at home and one was purchased in the later days of the Ward brother’s carving business and acquired on the eastern seaboard. We will check the stamp on the bottom of our piece to see if it is an authentic Ward Creation! Somehow I doubt it!
Upon arriving back to the camper, we took Onyx on the Bob trail again! It’s a good one! Had some good views of the Bald cypress!To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.” ― Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human ImaginationNow here is a bird that would be fun to carve. The Gray Egret.
hkdorr 
wow. I think you made the right choice. Beautiful!!